What is Domain Authority?
A third-party metric (from Moz) estimating how strongly a domain ranks overall — not used by Google directly.
Domain Authority (DA) is Moz's proprietary 0–100 score that estimates how well a domain ranks compared to other domains. Ahrefs has 'Domain Rating' (DR), Semrush has 'Authority Score' — same idea, different numbers. None of these are Google's actual metrics, but they correlate with how well sites rank in practice. Useful for: comparing your site to competitors, evaluating link-target candidates, tracking SEO progress over time. Not useful for: tuning specific pages — the score is aggregated across the whole domain. Don't optimize *for* DA directly; optimize for what creates it (good content, good links).